Over the last decade, technology has drastically improved the effectiveness of technology-based marketing. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have brought businesses back to their ancestral roots by providing organizations with a collective memory of every customer and their interactions. Previously, this was cost-prohibitive.
However, providing the optimal message to a customer is still a very cumbersome and time-consuming process. As a result, corporations have not fully benefited from the promise of real-time customized and personalized marketing. Many customized content and personalization initiatives remain undeveloped because of their prohibitive human and financial costs of implementation.
With the traditional targeted marketing paradigm, the seller initiates an interaction with the customer by analyzing historical data to segment customers offline and then “pushes” a message out to the customer. The seller then hopes for a response. However, other more proactive methods are desired.